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Stellar Crisis v3.2 - Software Release Notes Andy Graves - 28/2/2000

Motivation Since the release of Stellar Crisis v2.8, further development of the game has been plagued by the problem of code forking - that is, several developers or development teams working on the code in parallel, without reference to each other's efforts, some addressing issues that others chose to ignore, some adding features that others found unappealing. The result has been several significantly different current versions of the code, each of them representing the latest effort by one developer or group. The damage this does to progressive development of the game can most clearly be seen when a bug is found that enables players to cheat, and the technique for exploiting the bug becomes widely understood, which has happened several times in the last couple of years. Though a fix for the bug is usually found quickly, it isn't possible simply to incorporate it into the code, test it, and then distribute the new version to the user base - the server admins - because almost all the servers are running more or less different versions of the code. Instead, the fix has to be separately assessed for ramifications, applied and tested at each site, with the result that in some cases it has never been done and the vulnerable code is still in use and being regularly exploited at some servers. Difficulties eradicating 'cheat codes' are not the only drawback of the forked codebase, however. In general we have seen that the more distinct the different versions of the code become, the harder it is to incorporate even widely-accepted enhancements globally. It is the aim of this release to overcome this problem as far as maybe, by incorporating as many as possible of the most worthwhile and significant features of the various versions of the code into one - at least those versions which are still based on code by Sylvan Clebsch, the original author of Stellar Crisis. There are two other quite separate versions of the game, Stellar Crisis MkII and SC Almonaster, which have been written from scratch without inclusion of any code from Sylvan's original, and where they differ significantly from all of the Sylvan legacy versions, v3.2 makes no overt attempt to simulate their behaviour. SC v3.2 also incorporates some new features and enhancements which it is hoped will be met with general approval. In general, where possible, the intended ethos is to provide new features as options, whether at the server level, or in the case of game-play features, at the series-configuration level, or for user interface features, within the user profile. Among the most significant new features is the introduction of the Bridier Ranking System for 2-player (Grudge) games, enablement of which is a server-level option, and if it is enabled, it becomes a series configuration option. Next